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Phantasy Star Online is the much-anticipated sequel to the classic Phantasy Star series which appeared on the Genesis during the early 90's. The new Phantasy Star has a lot of expectations to live up to, in that it is part of the great Phantasy Star series and is the first online console RPG. To tell you flat out, this game blew me way, and it easily surpasses the other games in its venerable series.
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Lets start out with the visuals. They are flat out amazing! This is definitely one of the prettiest games to date. The monsters are well rendered, the animation is excellent, the effects are cool and diverse, the lighting is well done, and just everything about this game looks excellent. The great graphics don't hinder the level design either, because all 10 of the games areas are huge and rendered beautifully. On top of that, veterans of the Phantasy Star series will feel a little nostalgia towards many of the weapons and enemies from past games, rendered perfectly in 3D. To sum up the overall artwork and graphics that this game has, I can just say, "Wow."
Now, on to the actual game. The customabilty allowed when creating a character in PSO greatly adds to the overall experience. The character creator starts out with allowing you to choose from one of three different class types that have three variations for each. The classes that you can choose from are a warrior-like hunter class, a ranger class, and a magic-wielding force class. Suffice to say, the different variations and styles of play really add to the replay. Anyway, after you choose your class, you go into a menu, which allows you to customize your character's face, height, width, hair color, costume, name, and more. The great flexibility when creating a character allows your character to have a unique look when playing this game online.
After you create a character, you go right onto the Pioneer 2 ship which is orbiting the planet Ragol. This planet is where you will be doing your fighting, and I am happy to say that the battle system in PSO is excellent. It’s sort of like a strange mix of the N64 Zelda's combined with the dungeon crawling of Diablo. The combat system is easy to get into, although it is rather deep and takes quite a while to learn all the little tricks that will make you a good player. The combat system in this game is perfectly balanced, with special roles for each class type, which force you to use different methods of combat in order to succeed. There is only one little problem with combat in this game, and this is the lack of intelligence that the enemy AI has. However, it does not hurt the gameplay and on the whole, combat is both incredibly fun and intuitive.
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